This One Is About Intermezzo
By Sally Rooney
It’s time! And right on time, which means at least a couple months late. I am, of course, referring to my own contribution to the discourse surrounding the hottest book of the season, Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. I have read it for you. Well and for me because I wanted to, and also for my sisters who wanted me to, but also for you.
I am not a diehard Sally Rooney fan, but those aforementioned sisters sure are. They love her to pieces. They text about her in our group text instead of in their own separate conversation. I’m not immune to peer pressure. I gave in—we would read it for the podcast (Something We Read the podcast™). Meaning I would read it for the podcast because they both already had.
Yes, BOTH! Isabelle joined us for the recording, and it was a treat, and you should give it a listen. The dogs were barking, and we were sharing two microphones between the three of us, but we had a lot of fun.
As we discussed during the podcast, I am somewhat lukewarm on Rooney. This is not to say that I don’t like her writing, particularly from a craft perspective, I really do. I’m just not totally sold, not totally satisfied. It bothers me all the more because I can’t figure out why! What is it that’s causing this disconnect between me and an existence where I think Sally Rooney is the greatest living novelist???
I’ve spent some time theorizing, and here’s what I’ve come up with:
To start, I’m very much alive to the possibility that my contrarian nature and tendency to seek out weak points when it feels like everyone else and their mother is fawning over something could be the cause. But Rooney has plenty of detractors too, plenty more detractor-y than me, so it’s not like I need to carry the mantle alone.
I’ve also considered the fact that Rooney is a Marxist, and I am not. This possibility has more teeth, but not in the obvious, stupid way. I’m not bothered by her political musings—like when she makes her characters think about the labor market, the housing market, incels online, etc. She’s clearly opinionated, but opinionated is cool, and she’s not, for lack of a better word, annoying about it.
I think what actually bothers me is the way that Rooney thinks about her characters, the way she views her own creations. They are oppressed by elements outside of their control, they are taken advantage of, they have no power, and they will continue to suffer. The world she spins up is defined by dissonance and conflict instead of harmony and connection. I only theorize that Rooney’s Marxism is the cause of this effect, but it may not be.
Whatever the cause, this outlook chafes with my optimism and my belief in the human spirit’s ability to triumph under any circumstance. Rooney will not give me triumph of the human spirit. It’s just not on the menu. The relief Rooney grants her characters—their moments of happiness and the things they find to hold on to—tend to feel like stays of executions instead of genuine celebrations of the beauty of life.
And now we veer into the territory of pure personal preference, but there’s a reason I love George Eliot. When her characters are faced with difficult situations and moral dilemmas the likes of which Peter faces in this novel, just as an example (no spoilers! but he’s in romantically involved with two women at once), they are forced, either by their own sense of right and wrong or by external factors, out of those difficulties, through the clutches of all-consuming torment and into an existence of awe and unshakable self-certainty. Or they die. It may be old-fashioned, and the near-to-full-martyrdom might not be aspirational in the full sense of the word, but it is aspirational in some sense, and it moves me.
In Intermezzo, by and large, the characters don’t sacrifice. They suffer and they agonize and then they all basically get what they want (that’s not really a spoiler, but don’t think too hard about it). For all everyone talks about Rooney’s realism, I found the ending of the novel quite unrealistic. In being unrealistic, it should then have been inspiring, but it wasn’t that either.1 Maybe my resistance to Rooney, and to Intermezzo specifically, is actually as simple as it gets. I didn’t like the ending.
But I don’t want to leave you on that note. Even though I didn’t fall head over heels for this “voice of a generation,” I do think Rooney is a gifted writer, well worth reading, and I did enjoy the novel. Really, I more than enjoyed it. I contain multitudes!!!! There are many good things about Intermezzo, chief among them Rooney’s clear belief in the redemptive power of romantic love. Me and the girls discuss this at length on the podcast, so I once again encourage you to give it a listen. I literally bring myself to tears on mic just talking about it.
This felt particularly intense in Ivan and Margaret’s relationship, but also in Peter and Sylvia’s. One case of new love and one case of old love. Ivan, in love for the first time, realizes that a new type of comfort is available to him. When things are difficult, he comforts himself by thinking that he’ll see Margaret tomorrow or in two days or that weekend. Everything will be okay then. At the end of one phone call when Margaret has had a bad day, Ivan tells Maragret that he’ll be there tomorrow and that he has a feeling everything will be okay. She believes him. This interplay of comfort—and the relief that it provides—rang very true for me.
For Peter and Sylvia, there’s more history, but the same sentiment is expressed by Peter, or in Peter’s head I suppose, over and over again. He needs to be around Sylvia to feel calm and feel like himself. This type of interdependence has also fallen out of vogue a bit, and I appreciate that Rooney doesn’t shy away from it.
It is within the bounds of these romantic relationships that Ivan and Peter feel safe enough to let their guards down and poke at their own feelings and beliefs. As a result, they begin to soften towards each other.
Other good things include:
Her (agonizing) exploration of the ways we (sometimes willfully) misunderstand each other. I remember feeling this so acutely when I read Normal People, and boy, did she bring it back & better than ever. Peter and Ivan can’t figure out how to speak the same language, and as a result their perceptions of each other are so one dimensional. It’s easier to fall into the trap of viewing others in that way. We think about ourselves the most. I was squirming through this, waiting for them to just have a damn conversation.
Then there’s the way that she captures the unique bonds of brotherhood (siblinghood), even or especially when Ivan and Peter aren’t getting along. The way Ivan and Peter have totally different memories of the same situations, the way that all siblings do. The way that she argues, though quietly, that bonds of blood are valuable and worthy of preservation, even when it’s not easy. I remember one scene in particular where Ivan is telling Margaret about how he doesn’t really feel the need to reconcile with Peter, and Maragret thinks, though she doesn’t tell him, that there’s something important about them supporting each other through their grief. She thinks that it’s important that they have a relationship.
For that matter, there’s Margaret in general. I’m doing the good section right now, but Margaret was the only one of the three women that I felt like I really got to know. I wanted so much more from Sylvia and Naomi. But this is the good section. So I’ll just say that I loved Margaret.
There’s also the way that Ivan says ah, hm, okay, cool. The way her dialogue feels so realistic. The way that she writes differently for Ivan than she does for Peter. The way that she makes it work is a feat of creativity. I mention this on the podcast, but Peter’s sections are written in a very internal stream of consciousness style. It’s long paragraphs of his thoughts spiraling around, full of self-loathing and fear. With Ivan, the language is much more controlled—even just on the grammatical level. It all feels very logical and methodical, the way he puzzles over his own pain and tries to make sense of or at least box away his feelings. My understanding of each character was greatly enhanced by Rooney’s stylistic choices (and her ability to successfully pull them off).
Of course, also good are the sex scenes, the dog scenes, the beach scene. The beach scene was probably my favorite, and the passage I read during the podcast that made me cry was from after the beach.
How about the way that she makes her characters come face to face with the pain and power inherent in shared bonds of love and duty? Towards the end of the novel, when things are suitably knotted up and about to fall apart at the same time, Margaret gets off a phone call with Ivan and begins thinking about the ways in which her relationship with Ivan has pushed her obligations to others in her life into the background:
“Life, after all, has not slipped free of its netting. There is no such life, slipping free: life is itself the netting, holding people in place, making sense of things. It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on in a senseless existence. People, other people, make it impossible. But without other people, there would be no life at all…The demands of other people do not dissolve; they only multiply. More and more complex, more difficult. Which is another way, she thinks, of saying: more life, more and more life.”
Needless to say, I was struck when I read this passage. The difficulty of making sure that you are giving to each of the important relationships in your life what each is owed is something I think of often, and here it all is, so well summed up. Even better—the correct identification of this difficulty as a supreme blessing. How lucky to be bonded in such a way that you owe. This luck that makes up life.
Thanks for reading, love you, owe you, bye!
I should clarify here that I am primarily referring to the resolution of the romantic entanglements. Those were unrealistic and uninspiring. The resolution (or at least the beginning of it that we are privy to) of Peter & Ivan’s conflict is idealistic but more realistic, and it is inspiring.